Wednesday, October 15, 2008

I have too many goddam things I want to check out in the world of software development and not nearly enough time to entertain them in any significant fashion. There are a few tricklets missing or otherwise unpolished from my programming bag of demons that would prove to be valuable to my ability to dispense truth and beauty to the world of code. Here's the latest group of stuff that I want to dig into:

Ruby - Believe it or not I'm beginning to feel constrained in statically typed languages (it's a mostly love and partially hate relationship). Ruby seems to be all the rage so I want to poke around in it.

AOP - I would love nothing more than to break logging out of the components I write. I know I can abstract them out in one of a billion ways but I'd rather just have it be completely invisible to classes whose responsibilities should be focused on their task and not making sure log4net gets the message.

Being a computer scientist - I got so wrapped into the abstraction of software that I stopped thinking about the science of it. Steve Yegge reminded me just how much rust I've accumulated since graduating.

Agile Development - I've read the manifestos and some online documentation but I haven't committed to reading more details or purchasing any publications. The only reason I'm partially reluctant to start now is that it's a major uphill battle with my current team. They aren't dumb and they read about this stuff but there's no interest there. I'm not much on lobbying and I can't train them all (including the role of our manager).

Right now I'm mixed between finding out what AOP offerings there are for .NET and playing in Ruby development. I want to play with toys instead of read books.